Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Matthew Lenton, Vanishing Point and The Destroyed Room

It's mid November, and in a cluttered
upstairs rehearsal room in the Gorbals, Vanishing Point theatre
company are sat around a long table talking earnestly about their
forthcoming production of their new show, The Destroyed Room. The
co-production with Battersea Arts Centre opens at the Tron Theatre in
Glasgow at the end of February prior to dates in London and
Edinburgh, but in November at the end of a week of development, what
is advertised as being a show about voyeurism and witnessing things
through and beyond a TV screen has yet to find out what it is.

The rehearsal room set-up itself,
however, gives early hints of what The Destroyed Room may or may not
end up as. As actors Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Barnaby
Power, designer Kai Fischer and four others talk, with the all-seeing
eye of director Matthew Lenton at the table's head, it gradually
becomes apparent that, among the flight cases and speakers that
litter the floor, four video cameras mounted on tripods stand on each
side of the table. These are being operated by technicians, who
quietly film the proceedings, which is projected onto a screen at the
table's far end. The images on the screen flit between cameras, so
those watching from the sidelines can see what is being projected
from all angles.

Seen close up, the effect of all this
recalls After Dark, the open-ended late night round table discussion
programme which ran at weekends during the early days of a then
pioneering Channel 4. Unlike reality TV live feeds today, After Dark
was essential viewing, with some very serious talk enlivened even
more by unexpected events. These included Tory MP Teresa Gorman
storming off in the face of being challenged by singer Billy Bragg,
and a drunken Oliver Reed climbing on top of feminist writer Kate
Millett.

As impassioned as the talk is in the
Gorbals, about what does or doesn't constitute theatre, such outrages
are unlikely. There is, however, an obvious creative tension at play.

“What happened that day,” says
Lenton a month later, “is that we were trying to find out what it
was we wanted to look at, and how we wanted to look at it, and that
made for some very uncomfortable moments. Because so much of
Vanishing Point's work is done instinctively, it's not always easy to
know what you're doing with it, or even how I might want to direct
it.

“I'd said to the actors that day that
this was going to be a difficult show in terms of the things I wanted
us to explore, and if they found it too difficult, then the option
was there of not taking part in the show itself. But what's so
wonderful about everyone involved in the development week is that,
despite some of the difficulties that there was in terms of some of
the material that we were looking at, they were all willing to go
with it, and push themselves further than they might have been
comfortable with.”

The Destroyed Room takes its title from
a 1978 photograph by Canadian artist Jeff Wall. The picture, which
stages the contents, walls and windows of a room ripped asunder by
unknown forces, was subsequently used as a cover image for an album
of B sides and rarities by American art rock pioneers, Sonic Youth.
Wall's image itself references Eugene Delacroix's painting, La Mort
de Sardanapale, which depicts a scene of ongoing destruction.

While such a potpourri of pop cultural
detritus is not untypical as the starting point for Vanishing Point's
work, little of it is likely to be identifiable in the end result. In
this respect, while Vanishing Point's work begins as a theatre of
ideas, in translation and execution, it becomes a theatre of poetry.

Lenton talks too about Susan Sontag's
2003 book, Regarding The Pain of Others, in which the American writer
looked at the meaning and effects of war photography.

“Susan Sontag talked about how we try
and empathise with people's suffering,” says Lenton, “and how
whether an image can tell the whole story. There are many complex
possibilities that come out of that. Sontag talked about how whether
only people in the midst of suffering can do anything about it, while
the rest of us are voyeurs.”

In keeping with Sontag's observations,
The Destroyed Room isn't the first time Vanishing Point have looked
at the world through a glass darkly. In Wonderland the company peered
through the unflinching movie cameras of the porn industry. In
Interiors, the everyday lives of others were seen through a window by
a stranger left out in the cold.

The instinctive nature of Vanishing
Point's work is apparent when Lenton talks a month after the
development week for The Destroyed Room, when it feels like
everything has changed. The actions by terrorist bombers in Paris and
the subsequent retaliations by western forces have created a
spectacle which has reverberated around the world to devastating
effect. Lenton's thinking behind The Destroyed Room has not escaped
the fallout.

“The Daily Mail paid for an image of
a woman escaping death,” says Lenton, referring to pictures
published in the wake of the terrorist massacre at the Bataclan
theatre in Paris. “That made me think about how events like what
happened in Paris are conveyed by and through the media, and it took
me back to images of children being killed in Dunblane. Since
Bataclan, our country has taken the decision to bomb Syria.
Meanwhile, there was an incident on the London Underground in which
someone took a knife out, but rather than intervene, most people
filmed it on their phones.

“This is the territory we're
exploring with the show, that comes from a perception of all these
things that are happening around us. One of the things the
development week did was crystallise ideas
about the show, which seems to me to be about how we regard the
suffering of others, and how we react to events happening in the
world today. In some respects it could be seen as Vanishing Point's
most directly political work to date, but it's still abstract.”

A few days later, and things have
developed even more. Just a couple of weeks before rehearsals start,
and Lenton has drafted a rough forty page script of The Destroyed
Room for he and the actors to play with. As it stands, the show may
or may not start with people sat around a table talking, but, in
Lenton's words, “It will end very differently to how it begins.”

Inbetween, possibly, will be a look at
notions of empathy or the lack of it in the face of global
atrocities.

“It sounds like a terribly bleak
show,” says Lenton, “but there's humour there too, and what it's
really about reveals itself gradually. As with all Vanishing Point
shows, I hope there's light, shade, humour, abstraction, and most
importantly, beauty, and, I hesitate to say it, magic.”

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, The Quietus, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia and The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) and Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), and co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? and Time Out Edinburgh Guide. Neil has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival and Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on BBC and independent radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, and has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.